Bell Labs

From Free net encyclopedia

Image:Belllabs96.gifBell Laboratories, also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories, was the research and development arm of the United States Bell System. At its peak, Bell Labs was the premier facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies including the transistor, laser, and the UNIX operating system. Bell Labs had research and development facilities throughout the USA, with the greatest concentration of facilities located in New Jersey.

Among the locations in New Jersey were Crawford Hill, Freehold, Holmdel, Lincroft, Long Branch, Middletown, Murray Hill, Piscataway, Red Bank and Whippany. The largest facility in the country was at Naperville-Lisle, which had the single largest concentration of employees (about 11,000) prior to the telecomm bust of 2000. There were also facilities in Columbus, Ohio, Allentown and Breinigsville in Pennsylvania, and Westminster, Colorado. Since 2000, many of the former Bell Labs locations have been scaled back or shut down entirely. There have been 6 Nobel Prizes awarded for work done at Bell Labs. <ref>[1]</ref>

1 History
2 Calculators built by Bell Labs
3 See also
4 Footnotes
5 External links

[edit]

History

Image:Wisdombell.jpg Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc was established 1925 by Walter Gifford, then president of AT&T, as a separate entity which took over work previously conducted by the research division of Western Electric's engineering department. Half of Bell Labs was owned by Western Electric, the other half being owned by AT&T. During its first year of operation, the Facsimile (fax) transmission was first demonstrated publicly by the Bell Labs. In 1926, the laboratories invented the first synchronous-sound motion picture system <ref>[2]</ref>, and continued to create inventions throughout its lifetime.

In 1927, a long-distance television transmission, of images of Herbert Hoover, from Washington to New York was accomplished and in 1928 the Thermal noise in a resistor was measured by J.B. Johnson with Harry Nyquist providing a theoretical analysis. During the 1920s, the one-time pad cipher was invented by Gilbert Vernam and Joseph Mauborgne at the labs; Bell's Claude Shannon later proved that it was unbreakable.

In 1933, a foundation of radio astronomy was laid by Karl Jansky, part of his work investigating the origins of static on long distance communications, he discovered that radio waves were being emitted from the centre of the galaxy. Also in 1933, Stereo signals were transmitted live from Philadelphia to Washington DC. In 1937, the vocoder, the first electronic speech synthesizer, was invented and demonstrated by Homer Dudley and Bell researcher Clinton Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with George Paget Thomson for the discovery of electron diffraction, which helped lay the foundation for solid-state electronics.

Image:Transistors.agr.jpg At the start of the 1940s, the photovoltaic cell developed by Russell Ohl. In 1947, the transistor, probably the most important invention to come from Bell Laboratories, was invented by John Bardeen, William Bradford Shockley, and Walter Houser Brattain, all of whom subsequently won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1956. In 1948, "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", one of the founding works in information theory, was published by Claude Shannon in the Bell System Technical Journal; it built in part on earlier work in the field by Bell researchers Harry Nyquist and Ralph Hartley. In 1949, Bell Labs demonstrated the first remote operation of a teleprinter, which was in New Hampshire, and was controlled by a computer in New York City.

The 1950s saw fewer developments and less activity from Bell Labs. In 1956, TAT-1, the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid between Scotland and Newfoundland. A year later in 1957, MUSIC, was one of the first computer programs to play electronic music, created by Max Mathews; New greedy algorithms developed by Robert C. Prim and Joseph Kruskal, revolutionizing network design. In 1958, the laser was first described in a technical paper by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.

Image:Ledmrp.jpg The 1960s saw several important developments from Bell Labs, including the Light emitting diode (LED) in 1962, invented by Nick Holonyak. Since their invention, LEDs have been used in millions of commercial products around the world such as personal computers. In 1964, the Carbon dioxide laser was invented by Kumar Patel. In 1965, Penzias and Wilson discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background, and won the Nobel Prize in 1978. In 1966, Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM), a key technology in wireless services, was developed and patented by R. W. Chang. In 1968, Molecular beam epitaxy developed by J.R. Arthur and A.Y. Cho; allows semiconductor chips and laser matrices to be created one atomic layer at a time. In 1969, the UNIX operating system was created by Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, which has been used in several mainframes as other operating systems, UNIX has found its way into more modern operating systems such as Mac OS X. The Charge-coupled device (CCD) was invented in 1969 by Willard Boyle and George E. Smith.

Image:K&R C.jpg The 1970s and 1980s saw more and more computer-related inventions at the Bell Labs as part of the personal computing revolution. In 1970, the C programming language was developed by Dennis Ritchie for use on the UNIX operating system also developed at Bell Labs. In 1971, a computerized switching system for telephone traffic was invented by Erna Schneider Hoover, who received one of the first software patents. In 1976, Fiber optics systems were first tested in Georgia and in 1980, the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor, the BELLMAC-32A was demonstrated, it went into production in 1982. In 1980, the TDMA and CDMA digital cellular telephone technology was patented. In 1982, Fractional quantum Hall effect was discovered by Horst Störmer and former Bell Labs researchers Robert B. Laughlin and Daniel C. Tsui; they consequently won a Nobel Prize in 1998 for the discovery. In 1983, the [[C++]] programming language was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension to the original C programming language also developed at Bell Labs.

Image:Image135.gif In 1984, Karmarkar Linear Programming Algorithm was developed by mathematician Narendra Karmarkar. Also in 1984, A Divestiture agreement with the Federal government results in the break-up of AT&T: Bellcore is split off from Bell Labs to provide the same R&D functions for the newly created local exchange carriers. AT&T is also limited to using the Bell trademark in association with Bell Labs. Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc. is then renamed AT&T Bell Laboratories, Inc. In 1985, Laser cooling used to slow and manipulate atoms by Steven Chu and team. During the 1980s, the Plan 9 operating system was devloped as a replacement for Unix which was also developed at Bell Labs in 1969; Development of the Radiodrum, a three dimensional electronic instrument. In 1988, TAT-8 is the first fiber optic transatlantic cable.

In 1990, WaveLAN, the first wireless local area network (LAN) is developed at Bell Labs, wireless network technology would not become popular until the late 1990s and was first demonstrated in 1995. In 1991, the 56K modem technology was patented by Nuri Dagdeviren and his team. In 1994: Quantum cascade laser invented by Federico Capasso, Claire Gmachl and team. In 1996, SCALPEL electron lithography, which prints features atoms wide on microchips, was invented by Lloyd Harriott and team and the Inferno operating system, an update of Plan 9, was created by Dennis Ritchie with others using the new concurrent Limbo programming language.

AT&T spun off Bell Labs, along with most of its equipment-manufacturing business, into a new company named Lucent Technologies. AT&T retains a smaller number of researchers to form AT&T Laboratories. In 1997, 50 years after inventing the original transistor, the smallest practical transistor created, 60 nanometers or 182 atoms wide is invented. In 1998, the first optical router was invented and the first combination of voice and data traffic on an Internet Protocol (IP) network was done at the Labs.

2000 was a very active year for the Labs in which DNA machine prototypes were developed; Progressive geometry compression algorithm makes widespread 3-D communication practical; first electrically powered organic laser invented; Large-scale map of cosmic dark matter was provided and F-15, an organic material that makes plastic transistors possible, was invented. In 2002, Jan Hendrik Schön, a German physicist, is fired after his work is found to contain fraudulent data; it is the first case of fraud in the lab's history. Over a dozen of Schön's papers are found to contain fictional or altered data, including a paper on molecular-scale transistors that was portrayed as a breakthrough. Also in 2002, the world's first semiconductor laser that emits light continuously and reliably over a broad spectrum of infrared wavelengths was invented. In 2003, the New Jersey Nanotechnology Laboratory is the successor to Bell Laboratories at Murray Hill, New Jersey.

In April 2006, Bell Labs' mother company Lucent Technologies signed a merger agreement with Alcatel. This deal has raised concerns in the US, where Bell Labs works on highly sensitive defence contracts. It was announced that a separate company with a US board would be set up to manage Bell Labs' and Lucent's sensitive US government contracts.

[edit]

Calculators built by Bell Labs

Model I - Complex Number Calculator, completed January 1940, for doing calculations of complex numbers
Model II - Relay Calculator or Relay Interpolator, September 1943, for aiming anti-aircraft guns by interpolating from positions
Model III - Ballistic Computer, June 1944, for calculations of ballistic trajectories
Model IV - Bell Laboratories Relay Calculator, March 1945, a second Ballistic Computer
Model V - Bell Laboratories General Purpose Relay Calculator, two were built: July 1946 and February 1947. These were general-purpose programmable computers using electromechanical relays.
Model VI - November 1950, an enhanced Model V.